OPEN THREAD: Wherever you go, that’s where you are.
Archive for 2020
December 27, 2020
I LOVE THIS: Milton Friedman in ‘It’s A Miracle.’
SCIENCE: Asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 didn’t occur at all, study of 10 million finds. “Only 300 asymptomatic cases in the study of nearly 10 million were discovered, . . . A total of 1,174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they all tested negative for the COVID-19.”
MRS. ALEC BALDWIN MORPHED INTO ROBERT “BETO” O’ROURKE SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Cultural Appropriation Alert: Alec Baldwin’s Wife Torched for Faking Spanish Accent and Heritage, Megan Fox writes at PJM:
Hilaria Baldwin is married to Alec Baldwin, the mouthy star who does a terrible impression of Donald Trump for Saturday Night Live. Hilaria, or Hillary Hayward Thomas as she was known growing up in Boston, is on the receiving end of internet sleuths who seem to be out to cancel her for faking a Spanish accent and lying about where she was born. Page Six has the story.
Hilaria Baldwin has been forced to defend her fluctuating Spanish accent — and admitted that her name is “Hillary.”
The wife of Alec Baldwin took to Instagram Sunday morning after a Twitter storm erupted following a tweet which read: “You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.”
Baldwin’s own bio on her agency’s speakers site states that she was born on the island of Mallorca, Spain, and raised in Boston. Her 2016 interview with Hola! magazine also stated: “Hilaria, who was born in Spain, has made certain to raise her children with her native language, Spanish.”
During TV appearances, she has spoken with a pronounced Spanish accent, and on one occasion during a cooking segment she even seemingly forgot the English word for “cucumber.”
Here’s an [NBC] video of her with a strong accent describing married life, and another of her “forgetting” how to say cucumber.
Fake Spanish accent debut – this woman grew up in Massachusetts pic.twitter.com/TZO47iHgO7
— elena ilana alana alina elana (not) (@lenibriscoe) December 21, 2020
More here: Unpacking the Drama Around Hilaria Baldwin’s Accent.
Which is actually true: Baldwin’s family — at least her parents, Dr. Kathryn Hayward and David Thomas — do live in Mallorca, and per Page Six, have since 2011. But before that, they appeared to have lived in Massachusetts. Our Twitter sleuth dug up the following footage of Kathryn Hayward (“formerly an internist at the Massachusetts General Hospital,” per what looks like her website) speaking about her upbringing in Longmeadow, as well as Baldwin’s paternal grandfather’s obituary, which states that the Thomas “family presence in … Vermont pre-dated the American Revolution.” Baldwin’s grandfather’s professional travel to Argentina reportedly inspired his children to “become proficient in the Spanish language.”
* * * * * * * *
But Baldwin’s parents do not appear to have been Spanish, and the Cambridge School of Weston (a private high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts) names Hilaria Baldwin as an alumnus, which would suggest that she lived in the U.S. prior to turning 19. According to people who claim to have gone to school with Baldwin — some of whom, per Page Six, have tweeted that she was “fully a white girl from Cambridge” and “did not have her current accent” at that time — attest that Baldwin used to go by a different name: Hillary.
Earlier this year, Jonah Goldberg explored the concept of “Binaries For Me, Spectrums For Thee:”
At some point in the future people will look back at how the left made two contradictory arguments at the same time. When it comes to sexual identity, the word has gone forth to oppose “artificial” categories, “false binaries,” etc. People can define themselves sexually without any regard to medical science, never mind tradition or political or cultural orthodoxy. I’ve lost count of how many genders there are now. Just last week, CNN was so scared of using the word “women” it tweeted that “Individuals with a cervix are now recommended to start cervical cancers screening at 25 …”
Meanwhile, when it comes to race, it’s all about new artificial categories and enforced binaries. White people who pretend they’re black are committing theft. Heck, white people who cook non-white food or pay homage to non-white art forms are committing theft. Cultural appropriation is evil. But gender appropriation is something to be celebrated. Biological males can collect all the women’s track and field awards and that’s fine. But don’t you dare wear dreadlocks if you’re not black?
That’s just weird. But these are weird times.
The person who apparently outed Hillary Baldwin’s “cultural appropriation” tweeted:
“Grift” is an interesting choice of word, considering the trans-racialism and “cultural fluidity” of several recent Democratic Party presidential candidates. In 2019, Victor Davis Hanson explained “How Robert O’Rourke Became ‘Beto:’”
Beto seems to think that the current and continued Hispanicizing of his nomenclature (remember, at times Beto has dropped his nickname) will pay dividends in a national race. Yet according to his own logic, it should not, given his prior denunciations that America is incurably racist.
Given that all politicians entertain a degree of cynicism and opportunism, if we truly lived in a culture of white supremacy, we would more likely see candidates fabricating European dog-whistle names and identities than the sad efforts of a Churchill, Dolezal, O’Rourke, or Warren. And in fact, in a far different America of the past, many minority celebrities and politicians did assume Anglicized names on their unfortunately all-too-accurate assumption that too many white racists would ostracize them for their minority status.
Yet the opposite linguistic dynamic has been in play for some time. A young and politically ambitious Obama brilliantly understood that political reality when, in a twist to authenticity, he ceased going by his teenage nickname Barry and reverted to his actual birth name, Barack.
In terms of linguistic contortions or just simply adaptations, the force of compound names, accent marks, and ethnic sobriquets is to suggest perceived difference from, not homogeneity with, the majority population — to the extent that, in a racially intermarried and assimilated population, anyone’s ethnic heritage is clear.
In other words, O’Rourke’s use of Beto seems ipso facto to suggest that he privately believes in general that Americans of all backgrounds (including a supposed 70 percent white electorate) either do not care whether a candidate is so-called white or, more likely, are intrigued by or admire those who are not — again, sort of refuting Beto’s entire premise of an intolerant and all-powerful white-supremacist society.
Which may also explain a bit of what’s driving Alec Baldwin’s hardman shtick over his wife being outed as an apparent “cultural appropriator,” given his role over the last four years or so of playing President Trump on Saturday Night Live:
As Megan Fox asks at the first link, “Why anyone would try to pull off this hoax in the age of the internet, I have no idea. It seems so dumb to even try, yet plenty of people do it. Remember Rachel Dolezal? Or Jessica Krug? There’s no getting away with faking your heritage in 2020… I do enjoy, however, the fact that the race imposters are always ideologically far-left, even making a living on the race-obsessed culture in America. Race imposters are never conservatives. It’s always the fringe kook left that does things like this. Why isn’t anyone asking why? Has there ever been a conservative person who impersonated another race in order to be liked or to be more acceptable to their community? Who are the true racists in this country?”
GREAT FLOOD: Evidence of ancient tsunami uncovered on Israeli coast. “‘Paleo-tsunami’ is the term given to tsunamis that occurred prior to the historical record. Both geologic and historical records suggest the eastern Mediterranean has been struck by a tsunami about once every century over the last 6,000 years. . . . The positioning of the displaced sediment, unlike the sediment layers positioned above and below, suggests the ancient wave was between 50 and 130 feet high. The tsunami was powerful enough to have traveled between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 miles inland — much larger than later tsunamis, for which there is better documentation.”
2020: A CANCEL CULTURE ODYSSEY. Even Homer Gets Mobbed. A Massachusetts school has banned The Odyssey.
The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles. Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.”
Outsiders got a glimpse of the intensity of the #DisruptTexts campaign recently when self-described “antiracist teacher” Lorena Germán complained that many classics were written more than 70 years ago: “Think of US society before then & the values that shaped this nation afterwards. THAT is what is in those books.”
Jessica Cluess, an author of young-adult fiction, shot back: “If you think Hawthorne was on the side of the judgmental Puritans . . . then you are an absolute idiot and should not have the title of educator in your twitter bio.”
An online horde descended, accused Ms. Cluess of racism and “violence,” and demanded that Penguin Random House cancel her contract. The publisher hasn’t complied, perhaps because Ms. Cluess tweeted a ritual self-denunciation: “I take full responsibility for my unprovoked anger toward Lorena Germán. . . . I am committed to learning more about Ms. Germán’s important work with #DisruptTexts. . . . I will strive to do better.” That didn’t stop Ms. Cluess’s literary agent, Brooks Sherman, from denouncing her “racist and unacceptable” opinions and terminating their professional relationship.
The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” The English Department chairman of Lawrence Public Schools, Richard Gorham, didn’t respond to emails.
C.S. Lewis, call your office:
Lewis coined the term “chronological snobbery.” It is defined as the belief that “the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.” If we add, “and therefore wrong and also racist” to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs.
Historian Larry Taunton defines it as “imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.”
And Ray Bradbury, too. As Bradbury wrote in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”
HORSE, SAY GOODBYE TO BARN DOOR: U.S. now requires negative COVID-19 test for all air travelers from Britain.
Unless you’re an island somewhere, at this point the virus is sufficiently widespread that travel restrictions seem entirely cosmetic.
JUST DON’T MENTION THE WAR. 75 years ago in Wolfsburg: Start of series production of the Volkswagen Beetle.
HYPOCRISY IS THE TRIBUTE THAT VICE PAYS TO VIRTUE, AND FAKE BOOKSHELVES ARE THE TRIBUTE OUR ELITES PAY TO ACTUAL INTELLECT: Washington’s Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale. “Over the past two decades, Books by the Foot’s books-as-decor designs have become a fixture in the world of American politics, filling local appetite for books as status symbols, objects with the power to silently confer taste, intellect, sophistication or ideology upon the places they’re displayed or the people who own them. . . . When workplaces went remote and suddenly Zoom allowed co-workers new glimpses into one another’s homes, what New York Times writer Amanda Hess dubbed the ‘credibility bookcase’ became the hot-ticket item. (‘For a certain class of people, the home must function not only as a pandemic hunkering nest but also be optimized for presentation to the outside world,’ she wrote.)”
INSERT BAD SCHOOLBOY JOKES AND PUNS HERE: Are there aliens hiding around Uranus?
I wonder if they’re hooking up with the alien base on Saturn?
ROGER SIMON: Is the FBI Already Engaged in a Cover-Up in the Nashville Bombing?
Last year it was 4G and LTE. Next year it will be 6G and who knows what.
Paranoia, despite all the jokes about it (i. e. “A paranoid is someone who knows all the facts”), is commonly defined as “an instinct or thought process which is believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality.”
There is nothing delusional or irrational at all in thinking 5G, 4G or any G before or since, including the earliest iterations of cellular, is being used to spy on Americans.
It’s a fact. It is and has been.
Indeed, it has been known since the publication of James Bamford’s “The Puzzle Palace” the National Security Agency (NSA) and others have had the capability of spying on virtually every citizen of this country—and that was close to forty years ago (1983)!
And it’s only gotten worse since.
I’m sorry to say it, but anyone who thinks he or she has any privacy is a fool. Even the current president was spied upon.
Edward Snowden, as I indicated in my previous column, made it clear just how deeply implicated AT&T is in this activity. In fact that company may well be the government’s principle private industry ally in clandestine work, helping to connect it with other cellular companies.
If I know that, why wouldn’t Anthony